Today, March 30, is World Bipolar Day. It is observed every year on March 30, a date linked to the birthday of Vincent van Gogh.

As a bipolar myself, I want to say this.

It takes a little courage and a great deal of recklessness to share your hardships. The people who witness your struggle do not swallow your vulnerability easily. It is as if they are coming face to face with their own devil. Either they brush it aside with a “come on, you’re strong,” or they feel a kind of secondhand embarrassment over what you are sharing. Mostly because you are sharing it at all. We behave as if difficulty, weakness, illness, poverty, helplessness are some kind of contamination. And we are afraid misery might spread to us. Even the people who love us, when faced with hardship, reach for God, faith, optimism, the old “everything will be fine.” Well, what if it will not? That is exactly what we are sharing, that everything is not fine, that nothing is fine. And I do not know exactly what someone expects when they open up and lay their inner life bare like a rose just before it withers and fades. Maybe only a simple “you’re right, I hear you, I see you.” Maybe only that, visibility inside a blind world.